For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Blistering performances.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

. . . turning Hitler's Nuremberg Rallies into an international hit movie (TRIUMPH OF THE WILL), but like the Dodgers' Jackie Robinson, Leni had to first step on the shoulders of Giants to get to where she got. Only, in Leni's case, it was more like she was treading on gnomes, following in the footsteps of America's Tap-Dancing Terrorist Fred Astaire, who was never scarier than in 1935's TOP HAT. Viewers will pick up a threatening vibe from Freddy Kruger's Role Model early on, as he throws a fright into the fragile and half-asleep crowd of octogenarians packed into a Thackeray Reading Room. Next he attacks Ginger Rogers, stomping so hard on the ceiling of her hotel room that falling tiles wake her up at 3 AM; it's lucky that she isn't blinded! Upping the ante of his mayhem, Freddy pantomimes a literal 21-gun salute to close out TOP HAT's title song, "shooting" nearly two dozen chorus boys with his dancing cane between 44:30 and 45:10. He even "guns down" an audience member for an encore. If Today's Cleveland cops run across someone behaving like Freddy in his TOP HAT heyday, their rules of engagement probably will let them leave a thoroughly deceased hoofer on the ground in the park.

One of the best musicals ever, and perhaps Fred Astaire and Ginger Roger's best film as well. Edward Everett Horton and Eric Blore are hilarious. Plot is rather thin though, with comic mix-ups moving it along enough to display great songs and dance numbers.Astaire plays a dancer (imagine that!) named Jerry that's working for producer Hardwick (Horton). He meets Rogers when he interrupts her sleep, but she falls for him anyway. However, he hasn't given her his name so she assumes it's Hardwick, since Jerry is staying in Hardwick's room. Then she finds out that Hardwick is married (to Helen Broderick's character) and is disillusioned. Wonder if it all works out in the end?Directed by Mark Sandrich, the credited writers are Allan Scott and Dwight Taylor, who wrote the story. Lucille Ball and Donald Meek are among those who appear uncredited.Nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, its Art Direction, Dance Direction (for "Piccolino" and "Top Hat"), and Irving Berlin's Song "Cheek to Cheek" (#15 on AFI's 100 Top Movie Songs of All Time) also received Oscar nominations. The film was added to the National Film Registry in 1990. #15 on AFI's 25 Greatest Movie Musicals list.

Top Hat (1935)**** (out of 4) Dancer Jerry Travers (Fred Astaire) arrives in the UK for a show and soon meets the beautiful Dale Tremont (Ginger Rogers). The two quickly fall in love but then Dale thinks that he's actually the husband of her best friend. Not realizing that she's making a mistake, Dale does everything she can to destroy the relationship. TOP HAT is perhaps one of the best known of the ten teamings between Astaire and Rogers and it's easy to see why so many people love it. The two stars are in great form, there are many great songs and dance sequences and we've also got a pretty simple but very funny story that actually works. The screenplay is quite good even though there's really not too much that happens when you think about it. The first thirty-minutes has Astaire and Rogers meeting, flirting, dancing and falling in love. Then we get the mix-up to where Rogers thinks Astaire is married and for the next hour plus we get them fighting and dragging other people into the mess. I thought the stuff dealing with Rogers making the mistake was handled quite well and it led to many laughs and especially when the real husband gets involved with another man who has a thing for Rogers. The performances by the two leads are certainly everything you'd expect them to be. The chemistry between the stars is what made these teamings legendary and every bit of praise that has been said about them is rightly deserved. The supporting players offer up nice performances from Edward Everett Horton, Helen Broderick and Erik Rhodes. The song "Check to Check" is perhaps the most memorable from any of the Astaire-Rogers musicals but we also get an excellent "Isn't This a Lovely Day (to Be Caught in the Rain?" and "The Piccolino" at the finale is just divine. TOP HAT certainly deserves its reputation as one of the best musicals out there but I think it's the comedy that really makes it stand out.

Well, to get an impression of where I stand when I dismiss the musical aspects of this film, Fred and Ginger are, next to William Powell and Myrna Loy, the most watchable, most cinematic on-screen couple of the decade—urbane, witty, effortless. It is not their dancing together that impresses, not for me. Fred has done much better dancing in Easter Parade. The staging is most of the time uninteresting, spotlight on them, dull camera. And they are not what you would call superb actors by the contemporary sense of the term.It is the bubble of spontaneity and feigned amazement, the air of pleasant light friction they manage to sustain between them; a sense of soft clouds gliding against each other, the rain and lightning all for show.As said, the musical aspect doesn't touch me, it seems onedimensional— give me the self-reflexive dance in layers of something like Busby's Footlight Parade. What IS interesting about this, and their cinematic coupling in general, is that it is so much more than a cocktail party, that would be William and Myrna's charm (do see The Thin Man if you haven't). It will seem superficial at first, indeed most viewers have dismissed the story as a trifle rehash of their Gay Divorcée. It was probably seen as harmless at the time. The thing is basically a screwball with a few numbers.It probably excites me and not others, because my ongoing premise is that each film right down to the most crude, can be understood as a consciousness at the mercy of images it creates—the fun all in riding whims of perception as they enter the fray and stitch illusion.Let me unspool a bit of what goes on in the story to illustrate that. You have two lovers who curiously explore each other. We know they are destined, audiences knew then, it's as if they are already together and all this is being reflected back on. The place is Venice, the Hollywood studio version—the perfect scenery for embellishment and dreamlike digress, because it is so falsely idyllic. It really is an amazing set; imagine being a studio carpenter and going to work there every morning, what bliss..Now as fate would have it, there is the misunderstanding (mistaken identity) and all it kicks off. This is mirrored in a friendly couple, where imagined adultery is actually real and comes to the surface. You have the Italian dressmaker and annoying manservant as comic relief, both of whom act roles at one point or other, incidentally both are celibates so without anchor. On a third level, you have both lovers fabricating a supposed shared memory from the past, with Fred's, here's the magic of the couple in full effect, slyly improvised on the spot on top of Ginger's.Fateful changing of selves; splintered, older version of the reality of the characters; and third parallel mirror in obviously fabricated memory about veiled sex, which is at the core of everything. In Fred's story, he supposedly met Ginger years ago in Paris, who was going then by Madeleine—'Mad' in short as he calls her.How can anyone who has intimately known Vertigo see this and not sit back? Can't we say that some things enter the vocabulary with such power they transform in retrospect everything else?Oh, the abstraction is empty as we have it. This is a comedy, so we have too much control of the plot. There are whims in perception, but we are never lost. And all of it has been so deftly annotated since Vertigo and on, that there's nothing to take from it anymore, the next two or three steps have been taken. But there must have been a window, say no more than 10 years, when this really tickled the imagination and opened portals.